It’s a sham known as “sewer service.” When process servers regularly fail to deliver summonses, it leads to to automatic evictions for unwitting tenants.
Joseph Gelletich’s life began to unravel in September of 2018, 16 days after he missed a rent payment.
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His landlord filed an eviction lawsuit, triggering the legal process that would eventually leave him homeless. But Gelletich says he didn’t actually find out about the proceedings until months later — after many of his options for fighting to keep his apartment had already evaporated.
Gelletich had called Harvard Hall home since 1991. Almost 60 now, he moved into the stately, seven-story building at the southern end of Mount Pleasant as a young man, just starting a career remodeling kitchens and bathrooms.
In 1995, he moved up to a rent-controlled two-bedroom with his boyfriend, Patrick, who passed away a few months later. Gelletich resolved to stay in their home. “I saw no reason to ever live anywhere else,” he says. “I expected to die there.”
But by 2018, Gelletich’s financial situation had grown precarious: he found himself taking care of his ailing mother, while his longtime employer’s business collapsed.
Gelletich missed a monthly rent payment of $2,130 in September, and the property manager, Borger Management, promptly moved to evict him.
As part of that process, the company’s lawyers hired Karl Stephens, a prolific process server in eviction cases, to serve Gelletich with a summons to appear in D.C. Superior Court for a hearing. Stephens would later claim that he attempted to contact Gelletich twice to let him know about his eviction hearing, but that no one answered the door, so he left a summons outside his apartment and sent a second copy in the mail.
But Gelletich says he didn’t receive either copy of the summons, and thus wasn’t aware that his property manager had started eviction proceedings. Because he did not appear at the initial hearing on Oct. 11, Gelletich automatically lost the case.
After a few routine procedural steps, Borger Management had a green light to evict.